Do `Standard Procedures' Offer Fair Play For All?

Jim Spencer

February 07, 1999|By JIM SPENCER Daily Press

Standard operating procedure. Each time the investigation of a Hampton shooting involving a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent takes another weird turn, that's what police and the DEA tell the public: It's standard operating procedure.

Six DEA agents spend hours in a bar drinking. Three of them get thrown out of the bar for being rowdy. Two of them draw guns after looking at somebody wrong in the parking lot. One of them fires 13 rounds and wounds two people.

But no one gets his blood-alcohol level checked.

Cover-up, you huff.

No, the cops say, we check for drunkenness only in traffic stops, not at shooting scenes. It's standard operating procedure.

Apparently, it's also not out of the ordinary to let suspects in multiple- wounding cases leave the state for the weekend if they promise to come back. That's what Hampton police allowed the DEA trigger man to do. Hampton detectives questioned agent Joseph Armento on the night he shot two men. Then, instead of charging him, they let him go home to Connecticut for a few days, taking his word that he would return and turn himself in early the next week.

Standard operating procedure.

As standard as the bond that Armento got when he returned to Virginia and surrendered on charges of unlawful wounding and firing into an occupied vehicle. Bail was set at $28,000. That's 28 grand for a federal police officer, sworn to uphold the law, who drank for several hours, got bounced for brawling in a bar with his buddies, engaged in a "what're-you-lookin'-at" standoff in a parking lot, then pulled his pistol and unloaded 13 rounds, including a bullet that hit an unarmed man in the chest.

Meanwhile, Dennis Garlock, a 21-year-old sailor, sits in the Virginia Peninsula Regional Jail without bail on charges of using a slingshot to shoot ball bearings at a bunch of cars, including a York County sheriff's vehicle. Dennis Garlock would give up rights to his firstborn to get behind a little of Joe Armento's standard operating procedure.

Anybody charged with a crime would, and that counts both men whom Armento shot. The Hampton cops charged one of them, Joseph Turk, for brandishing a gun. Detectives say Turk pulled his pistol first, effectively causing Armento and one of his unidentified agent pals to go for their pieces. This is why Turk was charged with a crime, even though police found his gun, unfired, on the hood of a truck and even though he got shot in the arm. Oh, and by the way, police didn't bother to charge Armento with shooting Turk because they ruled it self-defense, which, of course, is standard operating procedure.

Jason Temple, the guy whom Armento plugged in the chest, had no weapons. He had had words with the DEA agents. He was backing his pickup out of a parking space when one of Armento's rounds missed his heart by an inch. Temple spent several days in intensive care. Neighbors say he required emergency surgery to reinflate a collapsed lung. But that turned out to be the least of his problems: Two weeks after he was shot, Hampton police proclaimed that Temple a drug dealer. They charged him with possession of cocaine and marijuana with intent to distribute. The charges stemmed from drugs the cops say they found in Temple's truck the night of the shooting.

The reason that they waited so long to bring the charges?

You guessed it - standard operating procedure.

Now, after all these standard operations, it's anybody's guess what's going to happen to any DEA agent involved in this mess.

That's because it's also standard operating procedure for the DEA to work behind a shroud of secrecy as thick as the CIA's.

It was days after the shooting before the DEA said anything about the incident.

Then, all it did was reissue a 1994 memo reading that it's against the rules for agents to drink on duty or when driving a company car.

It was two weeks later before the agency finally confirmed that the agents involved in the Hampton fracas had been placed on leave and that one of them had run away from the scene to hide in bushes during the shooting.

Then, in an fit of conscience, the DEA even confirmed that its agents drove to the bar in company cars.

And left in those same cars.

That's right:

After hours of drinking, fighting, indiscriminate gunfire and two civilian casualties, the G-men drove away into the night in their government-owned rides.

Did they drive drunk?

No one will ever know.

The folks who could have answered the question were too busy following standard operating procedure to find out.